The Camel Lady

Robyn explained to 702 Drive's Richard Glover why, as a young woman, she decided to head out into the Australian desert, just her and a few camels:

"It just seemed to me to be like something I wanted and needed to do, I had some instinctive understanding that I needed to do something like that to make an individual of myself, to forge a person out of these rather unprepossessing bits and pieces."

It took Robyn two years in Alice Springs to prepare for the trip which proved to be an adventure in itself:

"It was a scary place...I had to deal with some pretty heavy duty antagonism. I was an urban girl who dressed in sarongs, I was a leftie and I fetched up in this town."

Robyn feels she's not a courageous person, she says she just took very small steps and continued to do so until she found she had completed something.

Dealing with the camels that accompanied Robyn on her journey proved to be "a lot of trial and error and dealing with a lot of mad men. I was up at five every morning, running around with a lot of camels barefooted so my feet would toughen up."

She eventually got her own camels and the whole thing came together and off she set across the desert.

'I didn't plan it as a trip from A to B...the original intention was just to take these animals and disappear into the bush and wander around the desert and come out when I felt I was ready to come out."

It ended up being a long journey from Central Australia to the West Coast, which took her almost nine months and changed her in two ways:

"You get a perspective on what is normal because you're away from it...I've never lost the sense that we're all at least half-mad. And also because you're alone, and because you're hyper-aware of the environment you're in, it's as if the self starts to melt out into the environment."

"You're not this unit separated from everything else: you become a part of your environment. Of course that's a very scary feeling at first, because it's like disappearing."

Robyn went on to live in London and travelled with Nomads in India, but is now back in Australia and says she's happy with being the 'camel lady'.